About

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a ballad by American punk rock trio Green Day off their 2004 album American Idiot. Similar to It's Gonna Be May, the song's title lyric has inspired a series of time-specific jokes in which people remind each other every September that singer Billie Joe Armstrong is asleep and needs to be awakened on October 1st.

Origin

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is about the death of Armstrong's father.^[1] It was released as the fourth single off American Idiot on June 13th, 2005. It peaked at number 6 on the Billboard top 100. Its video, shown below, shows a young couple torn apart by the Iraq War and has nearly 90 million views as of September 1st, 2016.

Spread

"Wake up Billie Joe" jokes began the first September after the song was released as a single. For example, one of the joke's earliest known uses occurred in a blog post on mikezeller.blogspot.com,^[3] when Zeller posted "wake up billie joe…" on September 30th, 2005 (shown below).

The joke didn't begin gaining widespread popularity until the 2010s, however. A thread on the music website Drowned in Sound^[2] posted by Lucien on October 1st, 2010, asked if anyone had remembered to "wake up Billie Joe." A similar thread was posted to IGN^[4] on October 1st, 2011. Since then, the joke has regularly appeared around social media and in news publications. Image macros began appearing as early as 2010.^[6] An e-card was posted in 2012 and has gained 4.6 thousand shares in four years.^[7] The meme was soon applied to Advice Animals including Good Guy Greg (below, left), Slowpoke (below, center), and Overly Attached Girlfriend (below, right).

Uncyclopedia^[5] included October 1st, 2005 in notable October anniversaries for being the first time someone had to wake up the guy from Green Day. The joke has returned every year since 2010 and is popular on Twitter^[8] and Facebook.^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References